Get Your [IP Strategy] Act Together

"Intellectual Property has the shelf life of a banana." - Bill Gates
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I dove head first into the mix of innovation, venture creation, and law while doing my graduate studies in Intellectual Capital Management. Having now been within the European innovation community for nearly a decade, I've seen varying degrees of how well IP strategy and management is understood and executed from start-ups to large, multi-national corporations.

When I read the above quote from Bill Gates the other day I began thinking about why a genius innovator would state IP doesn't last, as his business relied heavily on innovation management and IP strategies. He executed them so well, in fact, that Microsoft had to settle in an antitrust case. What gives?

Markets, especially for technologies, become increasingly crowded over time. In many cases, products' designs eventually get to the point where they are practically indistinguishable. When this commoditization occurs, the result is a race to the bottom as pricing becomes the only possible competitive advantage.

What Mr. Gates quote refers to is this commodization and its effect on your intellectual property. In other words, always be innovating to differentiate your offerings and can use other means than price to maintain a competitive advantage. By creating, protecting, defending, and/or exploiting your intellectual property assets you avoid getting swept away in the dead end race to the bottom.
Consider the following points to start getting your act together with IP.

Uncover all of your intellectual assets
IP strategy is not only concerned with patents. Intellectual property pertains to trademarks, copyrights, design rights, and trade secrets. If you possess something that confers any kind of competitive advantage and it can be protected, do so. Even if that protection is simply limiting the spreading of the information (think Coca-Cola's syrup recipe or Colonel Sanders 7 secret herbs and spices).

Remember to highlight all of your intellectual asset areas to protect. Software is copyrighted as is all of your website content, sales materials, images, graphics, logo. If making your widget requires a special method, maybe it's better to keep it secret than to apply for a patent, which puts that method into the public domain. Does your widget have a unique design? Apply for design rights or design patents. If someone tells you it's not worth it to protect the geometric form of your widget or components of your widget, remind them that Apple was initially awarded $400 million against Samsung over this (though the value of the award is back in flux after a Dec. 6 verdict from SCOTUS).

Another aspect of IP management that's often overlooked is the company brand. Customers will tend to stay loyal purely because their needs are consistently satisfied by your company's products, so any dilution of this can cause serious harm. Brand management is often kept separate from IP management, which I believe is risky. As the face of your company, building and protecting your brand should certainly form a part of your comprehensive IP strategy.

Your IP is only as strong as your ability to protect it 
Investors love seeing that you have IP, and IP attorneys will welcome your billables. Just make sure they'll both be there to provide time, money, and expertise to defend the IP if someone violates it.

If someone violates your intellectual property rights but you don't have the financial means to withstand a possible lengthy litigation, then it isn't worth much. It's important to carefully weigh the cost (both of your time and money) to get the IP against its value it may actually bring.

Execute a Coherent Innovation Management Strategy
Companies of whatever size have to invest time in drafting and implementing a formal Intellectual Property strategy. This will allow the business not only to remain competitive, but access new revenue streams and markets.

Ten or twenty years ago, it might have been enough to call intellectual property a legal problem and deal with it as such. Not any more: innovation management should be a part of corporate strategy at the highest levels, and its goals should be consciously aligned with the company's medium and long-term aims.

Innovation may be encouraged by management actions, for example, by making R & D funding available for promising products. Many of the most successful technology companies also encourage their employees to spend some time at work developing their own projects. Generally speaking, however, innovation is unpredictable in where and what it will turn up. So empower your employees to speak their minds about e.g. process improvements or new product features. These can often times cost little and yield huge rewards.

It's not enough just to have a better mousetrap; you have to sell a few at some point. Executives may feel hesitant to commit resources to a “blue sky” project, but the risk/reward ratio needs to be weighed calmly and rationally. It might not be possible to fund every good idea adequately, but doing nothing almost guarantees that you'll be left behind the rest of your industry sooner or later.

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Author - Christopher Steele

A geek for innovation and complete news junkie. Passionate about technology, sales, and marketing on an international level.